Fox, Lester

ORAL HISTORY OF LESTER FOX
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
October 8, 2012
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel and today is October 8th, 2012 and I am at the home of Mr. Lester Fox in, I guess this is Clinton, isn't it?
MR. FOX: This is Clinton.
MR. MCDANIEL: It's between, it's actually between Oak Ridge and Clinton. Mr. Fox, thanks for taking the time to talk with us, I appreciate it. Now, I know you grew up, you were born and raised here and you grew up here and you've had quite an illustrious life in this area. So, why don't we just start at the very beginning. Why don't you tell me where you were born and something about your family and going to school and all of that.
MR. FOX: I was born in the Dutch Valley community, the Dutch Valley, the Donovan community, which was three mile east of Oliver Springs. I was the youngest of nine children, I had five brothers and three sisters and we lived on a two hundred acre farm. And for the first five years of school, I went to Donovan School, but my family ran a dairy farm and we delivered milk in Oliver Springs. And starting in the sixth grade, I had to transfer to the Oliver Springs School so I could deliver milk. I did it on a bicycle around town before school in the morning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year where you born?
MR. FOX: I was born in 1929, at the start of the Great Depression. My dad worked for the railroad company, he got laid off along about the time I was born. He never got called back to the railroad job until 1940.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FOX: And a short time after going back to work, of course without the medical treatment and all now, he had high blood pressure and he had a stroke and became disabled and he lived on until 1954, but he remained cripple from that stroke for the many years. And we delivered milk in Oliver Springs--
MR. MCDANIEL: So all of you, the whole family did that? Is that right?
MR. FOX: The whole family, but most of the older brother and sisters had left to different places to get jobs. Some of them had worked in Texas and some in North Carolina. And when I was a freshman in high school, we did not have a cafeteria at school. And I went downtown Oliver Springs from my school to a little cafe. And I could get a hamburger for fifteen cents and a Pepsi Cola for a nickel.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, you went to Oliver Springs High School?
MR. FOX: Oliver Springs Grammar School then onto Oliver Springs High School. And this particular day, I had a nickel left out of my twenty five cents, and I put it in a pinball machine, I won a hundred free plays. Me and my good buddy, Charles Jones, there was no way we were going back to school with a hundred free plays, so we continued on playing. We were suppose to be back in school by 1:00, but about 1:30, the plays were all gone and we were strolling back leisurely to school.
MR. MCDANIEL: And I know what you’re about to tell, but let’s go back a little bit though before we get to that part. So, how did you get to school, you know because you said you lived what, three miles outside of Oliver Springs.
MR. FOX: I rode a bicycle to Oliver Springs, an older brother that lived across the valley from us, he worked at the H. Sienknecht Company grocery store and combination dry good store in Oliver Springs. He would haul the milk down on his car, which was an older model car with a luggage rack on the back, and he would haul the milk and park right beside of the store. Me and my brother that was two years older than me would ride our bicycles. It didn't get too wet, too cold, or too snowy to make it to Oliver Springs. We got up each morning at 4:30 to milk the cows and to go deliver the milk fresh to people, set on people's front porch and brought a good high price. It was ten cents a quart that we got for milk back then.
MR. MCDANIEL: So that's how you all supported the family, was through the--
MR. FOX: That's how Mother supported our family with the milk that was sold but unfortunately, a rabid dog came through our neighborhood, and in 1942, two of our cows got bitten by the dog and they went mad. And we didn't know what was wrong with them until a veterinarian came. And so me and my brother and my mother all had to go take rabies shots because we had been around those mad cows and the Health Department shut us down as a dairy, and we couldn't sell any more milk and for thirty days we were quarantined. And we took the shots for 14 days and by that time, Mother had decided to close the dairy and we sold the cattle off at a very cheap price because they were milk cows.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was in 1942?
MR. FOX: That was in '42.
MR. MCDANIEL: So that turned out to be a pretty good time for that to happen as we'll find out here in a minute, won't we?
MR. FOX: That is true and then we go back to my time strolling back to school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah let me, I have a couple other questions about that.
MR. FOX: Okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: And this was in the 30's, you know, probably by this time you were talking about the late 30's and maybe 1940-ish or so, you were twelve, eleven, twelve, thirteen years old. And what was, you know you were old enough to remember, what was it like? What was Oliver Springs like and the whole area like?
MR. FOX: Oliver Springs was a very small little town. We had a football field, but no lights. All games had to be played in the day time and we played teams that were very close. We played Robertsville High School, we played Wheat High School, Coalfield, Oakdale, and Clinton and Harriman were two of the big teams that we played, while I was in high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, now did you play football?
MR. FOX: Yes I did, but I looked forward, I had been out a couple years for football at making the first team on my senior year, but we had about ten boys that had went into service without finishing high school and they came back to school at much older than the rest and we filled a real season football team at Oliver Springs.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh I bet, I bet you did. They were older than everybody else. And older and stronger. But let’s get back to your story. So here you are it was, what year was this? 1942?
MR. FOX: This was in the fall of '42.
MR. MCDANIEL: Fall of '42 and you had taken your nickel and you had played that pinball machine and had gotten extra plays. And you all were late getting back to school.
MR. FOX: So we were just strolling along, we were going to catch our 2 o'clock class, we changed classes every hour. And the telephone operator, Miss Myrtle, we all called her. She ran out on the porch of the house, of a dwelling house, where the phone was and said, “Boys, boys! Go get Mr. Britton. I have an important call from Washington, D.C.” We go running and we go right into the principal’s office to tell him the important phone call and we were all excited.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, was this Mr. Britton who eventually went to Clinton?
MR. FOX: That was his son.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, that was his son.
MR. FOX: Yeah, the principal in Clinton and his dad was the principal in Oliver Springs. His dad was a very small build weighed around 100 pounds and was completely bald headed. Didn't have a hair on his head, but he was one of the smartest people that I ever encountered in my life. He was very well educated and a very good teacher.
MR. MCDANIEL: So Miss Myrtle told you boys to get Mr. Britton.
MR. FOX: And we got Mr. Britton and he was good at running. He left on the run and of course we had a few minutes before we went to class. And we kindly waited around, and when he got back to school and it was before the class change at 2 o'clock. He rang the bell and told us to go by and tell all the classes to come to the gym for a meeting. And he told us that the federal government had condemned fifty something thousand acres of land and he give us the outline of it, starting at Elza Community, which we were familiar with and coming by the railroad track that had the tunnel through it and coming down the top of the ridge all the way down past Wheat School until it got down to the Clinch River.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now who called who, who was it that called?
MR. FOX: Senator McKeller.
MR. MCDANIEL: Senator McKeller.
MR. FOX: He was a very important senator and he was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in Washington. And I learned at a later date, the President called him in and said, “We've got these scientists that can split an atom and make a bomb so strong that it could end this war, but I don't know whether their theory will work or not.” Said, “We need to be able to build a plant for them to do it, could you hide it in the budget?” He said, “Yes sir, Mr. President. I sure can.” Where about in Tennessee are we going to build it? So I think it was a political trade-off and --
MR. MCDANIEL: So, Mr. Britton had you boys go and get all, tell all the teachers to get together, all the students in the classroom and you went to the gym and he started telling you all this.
MR. FOX: About his phone call and of course, turned out school early so people could go home and tell their parents. Of course then we had no television, very few homes had telephones. And so there wasn't much, a lot of the people were lucky if they got a Sunday paper. And a later date, I became the paper carrier in Oliver Springs and the surrounding area. And as Oak Ridge got started and the crowds moved in and people were living in people's barns and they were living in smokehouses, they were living in any place that they could put a roof over their head. And it would take me all day on Sunday to deliver the Sunday paper because I had to collect at each house because they may not be there the next week. They may get a room in Oak Ridge or a house, they were building houses in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you had, so I bet that was an exciting day. I bet that was an exciting time in Oliver Springs. Like lots of people talking about what was going on.
MR. FOX: Oh it was very exciting. And I still remember the remarks of my older brother-in-law that married my sister. He said, “What's old man Britton know about that, he don't know nothing, there ain't nothing going to happen over there.” How wrong he was.
MR. MCDANIEL: So this was probably late September, early October wasn't it?
MR. FOX: I'd say it was along September, October. It wasn't still one cool of a day I remember.
MR. MCDANIEL: So anyway which would have been about 70 years ago, wasn't it?
MR. FOX: You’re right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right now, it would have been 70 years ago right now.
MR. FOX: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay so tell me about the rest of the year and what happened.
MR. FOX: Well--
MR. MCDANIEL: With your family and school and everything.
MR. FOX: Well school and they started hiring people in Oak Ridge and my older brother was working at the Aluminum Company of America in Alcoa. He rode a bus from Oliver Springs that came up through Clinton. And to get to Alcoa then, there was no bridges across the river, you had to cross Henley Street Bridge and then take Maryville Highway out off of Chapman Highway. So he rode a bus and he bought a used bus and started running from Briceville. A lot of people were out of work in the Briceville community and they were hiring a lot of laborers and I remember going with him and riding the bus. I was a ticket puncher up front. We would sell tickets and then would punch the day out with a ticket puncher.
MR. MCDANIEL: So he went and bought a bus and was running it from Briceville to Oak Ridge.
MR. FOX: From Briceville to Oak Ridge. Paid $600 for this bus and it wasn't a very good bus. It was a '36 Dodge and one feature I remember greatly about it was, it had the benches long ways instead of the seats back in the older times. You had to have a good neighbor to sit behind you to have something to lean back on. There was no back rest on the center. But that's what he started out with--
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, so your family realized that this was an important, this was good opportunity to take advantage of. A lot of people came into town and you all kind of figured out what can we do to first help and you know make a living because you had just lost your dairy farm.
MR. FOX: Well people came along and knocked on our door and wanted to know if we had a room that we could rent and Mother rented two rooms in our big farm house. And these people were from down at Crossville and six of them stayed in those two rooms. And they were all carpenters. And after a month or so that they had been there, maybe three weeks to a month they were looking around when they come in from work and we had a three car garage down in front of the house. And it was built on a hillside so it was on different levels and my dad, him being disabled, he had had some lumber sawed out, a poplar tree and it was stacked up out there. And these gentlemen said if you'll let us, we'll go in and floor this garage, we've got a lot of buddies that are hunting a place to stay, can't find a place. So they went to work and just in a few evening they floored the garage. I can remember one section of it had a step down to get to the next level and no insulation, they cut windows out and nailed a board on the boards that they had took out and put hinges on it and used a stick to prop them open. Had a tin roof on it and put a big wood burning stove right in the middle of the room and twelve men rented and slept in six beds in this old converted garage. And they were also from Crossville. The 18 people that my mother kept, 16 of them were carpenters and the other two were truck drivers that hauled a bunch of material out to the carpenters. The two truck drivers were from down in Dalton, Georgia, and they were there six and seven days a week, but usually they got off on Sunday. And the people that would go home on Saturday night, then they'd drive back early on Monday morning. And we wouldn't have very many that would be there on Sunday night. And some of them that wouldn't go home would stay with us and we'd get out and play ball. There wasn't no T.V. or nothing for entertainment. But we all worked together, we washed dishes. And we were real fortunate that our farm house, we had a big bathroom with a big shower on the back porch. And I know we heated the water but I don't know, the good Lord may have been looking out from above. We had a hundred and twenty gallon water tank and it wasn't insulated. You learned real quick you didn't get close to it when you was changing clothes because it would burn you when you touched it. And when Mother cooked on a wood burning stove and it had a water back and it kept that water, there would be enough hot water for all 18 of those men to take a shower and still have hot water to wash the dishes with and all of us kids fell in and washed dishes or whatever needed to be done. And Mother would cook them a big breakfast and fix them a, they didn't have canteens to start with in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: She'd fix them lunch wouldn't she?
MR. FOX: She did fix them a lunch. Two sandwiches and a cake and an apple to put in their lunch. And she'd make five gallons of coffee. They all had a thermos bottle and they'd take them a thermos bottle of coffee with them to work and they would tell about the houses they were building on the, at the same time I would ride the buses. And we didn't have a telephone at home but we had one at school. Any of the bus drivers, my brother bought a second bus and then he heard there was a bus for sale down at Red Bank near Chattanooga. I rode with him down there and this farmer had this bus sitting out of the edge of the road for any passenger for sale. And it had very few miles on it. It had a ‘41 model chassis in under it but he had put the body on off a ‘36 model over on it as he had wrecked his previous bus. And we said, “Well, how did you change that body?” He said, “I took it into the barn and used my ropes and pulleys and pulled the body up off of it and put the chassis under it. And my brother bought it, I remember I think for seventeen hundred dollars.
MR. MCDANIEL: Which was a lot of money back then.
MR. FOX: Which was a lot of money then and he asked me, “Can you drive the car back?”, I said, “Yeah, I'll follow you and you drive the bus.”
MR. MCDANIEL: How old were you?
MR. FOX: I was thirteen. And I drove the car back and soon I was driving the buses around when they needed a repair. The principal, Mr. Britton at school would get a phone call and they'd call me to pick up bus number and they'd tell which plant it was at and would take it and get it repaired and tell me what was wrong with it and he would let me out of school. He said it was more important that you go help the war effort than you stay here in school. And I would get the buses and take them to Clinton to the Ford garage, we had an agreement with them that they'd do repairs for us. And then we'd take the bus back for the driver and pick my car up. But my brother that was running the buses and working at Alcoa had three buses going. They hadn't started the bus company in Oak Ridge, it hadn't gotten off the ground and he got his call to report for the Army for the draft call. And me and him was discussing it, he is still alive, he lives down in Oliver Springs. Building contractor, built many houses in the Oliver Springs area and then in Oak Ridge and he said I brought him to Clinton and he volunteered for the Air Force and he went through officer training and became a pilot in World War Two. But he had showed me where the buses all run and me and my brother that was two years older than me, I was thirteen, he was fifteen, we was going to run the bus line but I had an older brother, my brother Gene that was in the Army and had been in the past year or so and he was in the Tank Corps. He was a gunner in a tank. They were training up in the mountains of California and they went over a bluff and it turned over many times, probably several hundred feet down to the bottom of the ravine and broke his back. And he would write us letters. He was able to write and he was in a hospital in California and had been for probably six or seven months. Well after my brother left on Friday, on Sunday a taxi cab pulled into our place. He said I've got a telegram for you. Said it will be 75 cents for the taxi fare. I ran and got my mother and she paid him 75 cents and the telegram was from my brother that was in California we thought. And he said, “I'm on my way home, meet me at the Peggy Ann’s bus stop in Rockwood, 6:30 tonight.” So we went down to Rockwood and met him and came on back. And we told him, he didn't even know about the bus line that my brother Clyde had started. And so Monday morning he said, you come go with me and show me where these buses are and who the drivers are. Well he let me stay out of school all week long to show him about the bus line. He said, “Now you’re going back to school Monday.”
MR. MCDANIEL: And how old was he at this point?
MR. FOX: He was about twenty-six. He was thirteen years older than me. And all during the war that I worked around the garage, people would come in and ask me said where's your dad. I didn't bother to tell them that he was my brother, I just tell them where he was at. And we worked very good together and he had a, I had learned to drive. In '39 he bought a new '39 Chevrolet truck and was hauling coal up from the Briceville area to Knoxville for Braden Coal Company. And he would, then on his last trip of the day, the Federal Government had a deal that farmers could have lime to put on their pastures and their fields, under a grant and get it for free. And he would go up to Mascot and get a load of lime and we didn't have a time lime spredder, so he would scatter it with a shovel out of the back of the truck. He'd have to pull the truck up and I said well I can drive that truck, I've been watching him, I was ten. And so he let me start driving the truck and so I learned on a two ton truck. And so that helped me a lot when we got the buses so that I could drive the buses.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. So he came back and you all had the three buses.
MR. FOX: We had three, and within a couple weeks, American Industrial Transit started in Oak Ridge and they said they would lease buses to the operators. And so they started leasing our buses and as they kept growing we had to lease more buses and it's hard to believe what my brother would send me. He knew the people real well, most of them had worked for Greyhound and the government had gotten Greyhound to send some of their top officials to start the bus company in Oak Ridge. And they'd call and say we've got two buses we can let you have. He would tell them it’s okay for me to sign his name. I'd go down to AIT, American Industrial Transit and take drivers, sign his name, and pick up new buses.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now where was that, Knoxville?
MR. FOX: No, that was in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh was it? Okay, I see.
MR. FOX: American Industrial Transit and it was where the Therapy Center in Oak Ridge across from Methodist Medical center and the strip behind it all was a bus terminal.
MR. MCDANIEL: That was Central Bus Terminal, wasn't it called?
MR. FOX: Central Bus Terminal, right across behind was it the maintenance garage. And they recently tore it down and right, Methodist Medical Center is building an assisted living.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, I saw that the other day.
MR. FOX: On the facilities. But they would have a pit and people would be working down under buses that was as long as that building. There would probably be twenty buses lined up going through getting their oil changed and greased to maintain them. And they had janitors that cleaned the buses up and washed them because there was a lot of mud inside the buses. The buses that we used, they would really be a lot of mud. I used to take a water hose and go in on the weekend and clean the buses out, to get the mud out of them because there was a lot of mud in Oak Ridge. The roads was real--
MR. MCDANIEL: Now so you, you all were running the buses, I guess leasing buses weren't you?
MR. FOX: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Leasing busses from AIT?
MR. FOX: From American Industrial Transit, we were leasing the buses. We junked the old '36 Dodge that we started with, no one liked those. So we retired it early but the other buses run the full length of the war.
MR. MCDANIEL: How many did you end up with, how many buses?
MR. FOX: At the end of the war, we were running a hundred and three buses.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was just you and your brother’s, right?
MR. FOX: My brother and he could tell you where every run went. One day when we first got started, the Tennessee Railroad and Public Utility Commission came up and all bus drivers had to have a physical to drive a bus. So we had a little fifteen passenger bus and he loaded all of them up, the only doctor in this area who could give a physical was Dr. Stone down at Oliver Springs. At his clinic he also was delivering a lot of babies. And so they went down it to come time for the evening shift at 12 o'clock for the evening shift to go to work and they hadn't gotten back. So my brother was getting the mechanics and telling them, you go to Beach Grove, you go to Briceville. We had one driver that was about the same size that I was at that time. He weighed about 130 pounds. He had raised the seat up in the bus, put two 2 by 4's in under it, lowered it back down and scooted it and I still remember the bus number, 327. I told my brother, I can drive 327. He said, “Well, you take it go to Long Grove.” I went to Long Grove and backed around a store there and everyone was lined up about 50 people. Two big husky construction workers asked me where the driver was and I said well he had to go to Oliver Springs to get a physical, he'll meet us in Lake City. One of them said, the other one said are you going to ride with him? He come out with a little oath and he said yeah, I've seen him drive everything. When those two got on, the other forty-eight people followed them. I loaded up fifty people on a bus.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FOX: But I drove very, very careful. This road had a lot of road with no guardrail and even today there's part of that road that’s not got a guardrail on it. And I drove it into Lake City and the driver was waiting and I got off and he got on. But I'd worked there at the station, the buses had to gas up every trip, going. And we had some that run out of Jellico and Oneida. They had to gas up going both directions. The tank wasn't big enough for them to make a big round trip. And so as they would come in off the run, they'd have to turn around to get to the gas pump that was right in the middle of Lake City and gas them up at both directions. And how we wound with as many buses they, was an operator in Lafollette, Tennessee, that had several buses and the federal government got him for not reporting his reports right and they were defrauding the government and sent him to the penitentiary. They took all of his government busesand gave them to my brother to run. And the operator that ran out of Jellico down through Elk Valley, he got nervous and he come to my brother and said if you take my buses, I'll quit. So he took them too. So that give us, when the war was over we was running 103 buses and had a mechanic crew that worked on the buses. And one mechanic I learned a lot from that a little small guy from North Carolina often wondered why he didn't go to Oak Ridge to get a job. But he was a real good mechanic, he could fix, he worked on race cars in North Carolina after several years of him working, he finally told me the reason he was wanted it in North Carolina for hauling moonshine liquor and he knew if he went to get it, they investigated in Oak Ridge, they'd know where he was at for him to get a clearance. And I wondered why he would always wait and go home about dark to drive to North Carolina and he had come back and get back early in the morning. He’d drive in darkness back and forth home but he was a very good mechanic and became a good friend and taught me a lot about mechanical work and maintaining vehicles.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now where the government, were they good to you all? Did they pay you well?
MR. FOX: The government was real straight. They were real good to operate with but they wanted you to run a straight set of books and you were paid in more or less cost plus of what you spent. And the government would sell tickets to ride the bus and you could ride seven days for a dollar and a half. And they changed colors and have a different color, well then occasionally you'd have a rider that wouldn't have ticket. And each driver had a fill out a trip report, he had to do that every trip. He had to put all the ticket stubs, how many people that he hauled on each run and how many cash fares he had. And the federal government prosecuted some drivers for stealing the cash fares and not reporting them correct. The government had people a riding buses and different things that were FBI agents and one particular instance I remember, a gentleman moved into Lake City and rented an apartment in the same apartment complex that my brother had an apartment I stayed in. Well, he would come and loaf around at our garage shop. Well me and him got to going out to eat together after I'd get all the buses headed into Oak Ridge. We'd go one of the restaurants to eat. And finally one day he said, he was about the same size that I was, a little small guy. Probably he was I’d say in his mid-20's, or between 25 and 30. Said I'd like to borrow a pair of your greasy coveralls. And I said what you want with them. And he told me that if you ever tell anybody, this could get me killed. He showed me his papers, he was an FBI agent. And he said I've got to go into a shop and work and there is some loose talk going around. And they want nobody to talk about what they were doing. And so he went back in the shop and got a hold of some greasy transmissions and what not. Grease his hands up, got grease in under his finger nails, borrowed my greasy coveralls. He didn't want a clean pair; he wanted a pair of greasy ones. He wore those into work and went to work in this shop and stayed as a new worker and wasn't really doing the work. He was piddling around seeing what he could hear people talking about. And of course, it's even wrote in the history that people was talking on the bus, one guy working a crossword puzzle and wanted to know what the symbol was for uranium, well they right quick grabbed him and he got off the bus.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet they did.
MR. FOX: But it was something to see all the construction equipment that I'd never seen in my life with them building Y-12. And I was at Y-12 more and K-25 than I was at X-10. We hauled workers to X-10 but just occasionally I'd have to go there to pick a bus up. But I was 13 year old and I drove the wrecker and I drove it over the weekend. There was a lot of accidents on the two lane roads around and people got out a drinking on Saturday night and I'd drive the wrecker over the weekend and pulling in wrecks. And state trooper would be there. He'd never say anything to me about my license and I would drive to Knoxville every day. Government sold us a '42 Chevrolet pickup that was practically new to use for a parts truck. And I'd go to Knoxville and pick up parts everyday practically we'd need a bunch of parts because we had several different brands of buses. Yeah, we had Internationals and Dodges and Chevrolets.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now did you have to have the parts shipped into Knoxville or were they readily available in Knoxville?
MR. FOX: The dealers in Knoxville and I would even go into Maryville and round up parts for the buses from a couple of dealers in Maryville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well that was, and you've got to think of that to; that was in the heyday of buses. I mean you know, a lot of buses ran back then you know, a lot more than now I imagine.
MR. FOX: Reeder Chevrolet in Knoxville carried a lot of truck parts and I was in Reeders' just about every day. B&B Chevrolet, which later became Beaty Chevrolet. I'd go to both of them, maybe one wouldn't have it, another would. I'd go to International, I'd go to Kerr Motor Company, I'd go to Spires Motor Company, the Ford dealer, and then I'd go over to Maryville. I remember going in at Maryville and I became friends with them there and they said well we don't know what we’re going to do. They said the government sent us a telegram this morning for us to not sell any new vehicles that we've got that the government is going to take and they'll pay for them and take all the vehicles.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FOX: Yep, they had an order out and they went around to dealerships picking up the new vehicles. They had a quonset hut set up, kind of a production line.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FOX: And the headlights and the taillights and glass is all taped up and the painted them G.I. color.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FOX: Olive Drab.
MR. MCDANIEL: And where did those go?
MR. FOX: They went for the people working in Oak Ridge. They donated for security cars, of course the army was taking care of the security and they had their Jeeps but they needed trucks, they needed pickups and any description of truck they found a place to put it. Then they took all of the new vehicles and--
MR. MCDANIEL: Just bought them all and got them ready--
MR. FOX: The government bought them to use them at government installations. And they brought a bunch of tractor trailer buses in that, the Central Terminal in Oak Ridge that maybe part of the workers on that bus would go to X-10 part of them to K-25 and party to Y-12. Well they could get off and free transfer and get on one of these tractor trailer type buses. And they also run some of the tractor trailer type buses to Knoxville, hauling workers. Well they had a little coal burning stove that sat back in the bus, in the back of them. And one day down at K-25, that as they turned a sharp turn, that stove turned over. And the caught the bus body on fire and I was really surprised, it burnt all the wood off of it and it was a car hauler. It still had the ratchet tie down chain still in the bottom of it and parts of skids were still into it. And they had taken all of the car haulers, because they weren't making any cars for civilian use and made buses out of them and the government had bought all of them up and put a wooden plywood body on them. And they called them cattle cars back then, but they tore that burned--
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, was anyone in the bus when it fell over.
MR. FOX: No it burned out, nobody got injured in it. But I think the bus was empty and the stove turned over where they kept a fire.
MR. MCDANIEL: And it was wood so it burned up.
MR. FOX: Yeah you'd see them going down the road, a small little pipe sticking up. When it turned back, a smoke rolling out of the trailer.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure, my goodness. So you all did this throughout the war. So, why don't you tell me what happened at the end of the war.
MR. FOX: Well let me tell you another thing, a funny thing that happened. I was over in Knoxville and Reeder Chevrolet was down on State Street. A large wide sidewalk about ten feet wide and I would pull up on that sidewalk and run in and get my parts. And the Greyhound bus station was across the street and they had no parking there for a little ways but I wouldn't [park] in the street, I was up on the sidewalk. Well this big policeman came down when I was loading my parts up. He had his foot propped up on my rear bumper and writing a ticket. And he said, where's your driver’s license boy? I said I ain't got any, I'm working for the war effort. And I'd been okay if I would have hushed then but being a kind of smart ale I guess. I looked up to him and said what are you doing. He said you know I can take you to jail. And I said I'll tell you what. I got my little black book out. I said I've got to call the government in Oak Ridge and let them to tell you to turn me loose. These buses got to run, I've got some important parts here. You know he studied for a minute then he said you go on. Well the next day I was back in town, I run up on that sidewalk, I seen him up the street there about 50, 75 yards writing parking tickets, I give him a high five and he waved back at me and we had no more problems. But the state trooper came in at Lake City and he was there every day. We'd stop and get him a nickel Coke-Cola and some of them told him I had a birthday coming up on Friday. He comes to me, he said I want to see you down at Clinton and get you some driver’s license Friday. He said I'm getting too much static of you driving these buses and this wrecker and all. And I said Doug, I won't be but 14. He said you look to me like you 16, you be down there. Well so happened, Friday morning I had a call. A bus broke down in Oak Ridge and I had the wrecker and I stopped at the courthouse in Clinton and went in and my buddy there, Doug and two other troopers. He said give this boy some driver's license. Said he turned 16 today. And they said well what’s your full name, I told them, address and he said, you don't need to give him any test, I've seen him drive everything. They typed me up a set of driver's licenses. They said two dollars please and handed them to me and I walk out the door but I told it as a joke that old courthouse just had 10 foot doors. I grew up so much when I got those driver license in my pocket, I was bumping my head on the top of that door.
MR. MCDANIEL: How funny. So you ended up with a driver’s license even though you shouldn't have had one for a couple of years.
MR. FOX: That is true, but you know the war was on and America was united and everybody was working for the war effort. On one occasions before that, I'd went to pick a bus up in Oak Ridge and got back just below Clinton, where the high school is down in Clinton. That was the main road and there was another bus broke down, one of ours. And I told the driver to take a red flag and go up and let me get in front of him. So I had a wrecker, a bus, a 40 foot of chain and another bus. When I turned the corner to get on 25 W going toward Lake City, I look and seen the trooper running across the courthouse lawn. I knew he was coming after me. So he pulls me over where the ice house was up there at Clinton and I pulled up in there. He got out and said don't you know to pull trains in the state of Tennessee you've got to put them on a track? And I said I was aiming to take them to the top of the hill and leave it, and then come back and get it. He said no you drop this bus behind, you go up here and drop the bus that you’re pulling, comeback and hook this other one up and take it on to Lake City. And he started walking, he turned around and pointed his finger at me and he said if you stop and hook that second bus I'm going to put you into the jail. I believed him, I didn't hook it up. But it was a great time and--
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet you learned a lot didn't you? At such a young age?
MR. FOX: I learned a lot at a very young age. I learned a lot of mechanical work, I learned how to weld.
MR. MCDANIEL: Learned how to deal with people.
MR. FOX: How to deal with people and it was just a great experience growing up in the greatest time, I guess, on earth.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure exactly. So at the end of the war, what happened?
MR. FOX: At the end of the war, everybody was going back home. And in fact I have been a very, very lucky person all my life. When the fourth of July when I was sixteen year old, I bought a chance on a new Jeep from American Legion. The war was over. For one dollar, I won that Jeep at the Clinton Fair Ground. And a brand new Jeep for one dollar and it kind of got me in trouble over at Lake City where we had the shop running and where I met my wife and married her, I was lucky again. But her mother, when I had that Jeep she said, that boy driving that Jeep around I believe he is a smart-alec. She said don't you have anything to do with him. That was like pouring gas on a fire. But she became my best friend. She's deceased now and we were very fortunate. We would have been married 62 years come November the 11th. And we've had a great life, raised three sons and just had a wonderful life. And after the war was over--
MR. MCDANIEL: You won that Jeep.
MR. FOX: I won the Jeep. And in, it had no heater, no radio and it got kind of cold at Christmas time. And someone put an ad in the paper, had a '41 Chevrolet, will trade for a Jeep. I answered the ad, called the number and the man was in Clinton and he had a camping trailer. He was from Nashville and he had worked in Oak Ridge, he didn't have a trailer hitch on his car and a Jeep had a hitch on the back of them. And we traded, I traded even and he used it to pull his camping trailer back to Nashville. He got laid off and was wanting to go back to Nashville. And we traded and that got me started but when I was running my paper route down to Oliver Springs, there was an older car siting in one of my customer's yard and her name was Grace. And I said Grace what are you going to do with that car? She said we want to sell it for $15 but said the transmission is bad in it. I counted my money and said I can't buy it today but I can next week. I didn't have but twelve dollars and something right then. But I said you hold it for me. Well I bought it for $15 and my brother bought me a transmission for $5 for me cleaning up the buses. I went with him to get a part for the buses in Knoxville from a junk yard. I put it in and my mother let me drive it on down to Oliver Springs. They had opened a movie theater in a garage down there, which is still there today, they're restoring it and--
MR. MCDANIEL: What year was this, how old were you when this happened?
MR. FOX: That was in '43.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay.
MR. FOX: I was 13 and drove the car down and I remember the brakes screeched real loud, I was embarrassed because the brakes screeched so loud. It got everyone’s attention and this boy came over and said whose car are you driving? I said that's mine buddy it's paid for. And he said well I got me a job over at the project and he said what would you take for that car? I said I'd take $75 for it. He said I ain't got but $60 but I'll give you $60. I said give me your money. I got his $60 and walked home, three miles back home. That may have been when I decided the car business was pretty good. And my senior year in school, I'd won the Jeep and I'd save my money during the war and we had seven or eight boys that back and finishing up high school. Well they were selling the surplus vehicles in Oak Ridge in '46, the fall of '46. And but you had to be a veteran to buy then. Well these buys was going to school to get $50 a month off the government to finish school. I said, “Boys, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll take you to Knoxville and get you a permit from the Veteran’s Administration and each vehicle that you buy, I'll give you $50 from buying it for me and I'll pay for the vehicle.” Well they was about six of them lined up and I went and told the professor what we were doing. He said that was a good smart idea. Said I'll excuse ya'll from school. He'd excuse all of us to go to the auction from school. And so I bought surplus vehicles and resold them and made good money while I was in high school. And then I was with my brother, he bought some buses from Greyhound in Louisville, Kentucky. And I went with him to go up and drive one of them back, well they had a bus sitting there that had the grill knocked out of its front end. I said what are you going to do with that wrecked bus, I said I'll make me a coal truck out of that. And the gentlemen said, “Son if you want that bus, I'll take $400 for it.” I had $400 in my pocket and paid him, brought it back, couldn't bring it that day because the headlights were knocked out of it and I had to wait and get up there early in the morning where I could make it home without any lights. And I sold the body off of it for $225 and a gentleman lived in it for over twenty year out on the Clinch River, right near the Massengill Bridge. He took that body off it, I let him drive the bus out, take it off of them and then brought the bus back, the chassis back. And I built a coal truck myself, did all the work myself. And put it on a coal haul down at Oliver Springs. And it worked out very good for me, I run it for couple of years down there because that was a big thing. K-25 was burning a lot of coal at the steam plant and I got married in 1950 and went into the Army and when we came back out I was in the Army Reserve down at Elza Gate, it's where we met. And it was an engineering outfit, I was a bulldozer operator to operate the bulldozer. And stayed in it for 6 years, but when I came home from the Army, looked around for a job and K-25 was hiring. Said they were starting a training for maintenance mechanics. And I filled out the application and they said well it will probably be six months before we call you because we have to get you Q-clearance. Well they called me in one week and I thought somebody was playing a joke on me. And the man said nope, when I went down there they said why didn't you tell me you had a Q-clearance. Said all we had to check was the week you was home from the Army to clear you. And so for six months they wouldn't let you start the program. And so they put me at the welding shop, a man named Charlie Johnson run it, K-25, where all the welders hiring in had to come take their test and all the welders that worked out there would have to take tests every six months to a year to get certified again. And so they give me a pickup truck to drive and I worked there with him and learned to weld and I could pass a first class welders test but I had no working experience as a welder. And it was great issue, a lot of people was waiting to get their Q-clearance, that they'd let come and stay at the fire hall and I could take two of them with me on my badge to go get lunch over in the cafeteria. And they just lined up every day and I'd kind of kept record of it and passed it around, they wanted to see inside that plant, where they was going to work, to ride over with me. But one particular day they called at the Personnel Office, said we've got a welder up here to take a welder’s test and I'd have to go over and they had a guard on the door of the dormitory type building that the offices was in. And I'd have to go into the Personnel officer and he'd give me the candidate for welding and I'd take them back over. Well, this little guy I asked where you from. He said Louisiana, he was a little dark complexed Cajun guy. I said where you been welding at, he said I've been welding on the pipeline down there. So I brought him over to the welding shop and took him in the room and I'd set up the test for them to take. And Johnson the man who run it could listen without even looking at the weld. He could listen to the welder and tell you if they were a good welder or not. And this guy got this all welded up and Johnson said this man’s got experience and he's not stuck the rod one time and said man he's got it burning just right, he could tell by the hum of the machine. About that time, well the telephone rang and it was Personnel said bring that person back immediately over here. He told me they said they want him back at the Personnel Office. So I loaded him up and I looked at his weld and me and Johnson both did. We said boy he made a pretty weld, where he welded it up. Well when I get back over to the Personnel Office, I was kind of surprised, usually there was just one guard on the gate, but there was three. Two was a milling around outside. And I walked up and showed my badge to go through, I heard a little commotion, the other guy was behind me. When I turned around they done had handcuffs on him. He was a wanted fugitive, we could never figure out what for, what job, lots of them tried to find out but it really doesn't matter. But they arrested him right there. He was a wanted fugitive but he was a good welder.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess he'll be welding in prison.
MR. FOX: Right but I worked out the apprenticeship and became a first class mechanic and so they started laying off at K-25. And the Cold War efforts was some settled with Russia in '54. We were sitting around talking and this one boy, a buddy of mine, and I was one of the first they hired, in fact I was the first one they hired. And he was about three hundred and forty down the list and he had got his layoff slip and we were eating lunch. And I said, I'll tell you what do, if they'll let me take your layoff slip, I got a job I can go to and let you stay. And all these experienced mechanics around looked at me and said, have you lost your mind? Have you gone crazy? I said no, I can go help my brother go sell cars. And they, so we went and got the foreman and asked him and he said well the only person that can approve is V. B. Goddard, he was over all of the maintenance. And he said I'll go ask him. The next day they said yep, we'll let you take his layoff slip and he can stay on, V. B. approved it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FOX: But he said we can't pay you any interest on your savings plan. I was putting a dollar a week in a savings plan, I lost a dollar and forty-two cents interest on my savings plan.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my goodness.
MR. FOX: But I went into the car business and was always at the right place at the right time and one day my brother was out of town for a week and guy rolled in and said I'd like to sign you up with a Toyota franchise. I looked the car all over, I got my mechanic--
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what year was this?
MR. FOX: That was in 1966.
MR. MCDANIEL: '66. Toyotas' were new weren't they? I mean well new to the United States.
MR. FOX: New to America and of course we didn't have cell phones or anything, my brother was gone. I signed up, filled out all the paper work on Friday, he called me on Saturday said I've got you approved, can I come out and pick up a check for $2800 for your parts shipment and your signs and get an order for 18 cars, that’s what they require you to do. And so my brother got back on Sunday and said well how’s business been? I said well it's been real good, we've sold about 50 used cars this week but I said, we're a new car dealer now. He said what's that? I said Toyota. He said what is a Toyota, I ain't ever heard of one. It's a good little car, I called out buddies down at Chattanooga, they've had it for a hundred days and they've sold a hundred cars. And so it lagged on and unfortunately my brother got killed two years late in a car accident, '68. And Toyota never did really catch on until the energy crunch of '73. And I was very fortunate at the time, I had been arguing with my district manager to give me more cars and more cars. And it was in the fall of the year he call me up and said, we'll I've got a bunch of cars that dealers didn't take. I said I've got a hundred and one cars. And I said well what have you got? He read the list over what they all are and he said how many do you want? I said I'll take all of them. And he said well you know I just give you 30 cars in the allocation yesterday. I said I know that and so they called back the next day and wanted to know if we was able to pay for that many cars. I said yeah if you bring the paperwork down here with the proper signature on it, we'll just pay you in one dollar bills. So they went ahead and shipped the cars and it was a real lucky move. And gas got scarce and they went on a turn in earn. I had all those cars in stock so that got me, I could get a hundred cars a month from Toyota right when they were really scarce.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FOX: To end, it initiated exactly the right time for me because I had the big inventory.
MR. MCDANIEL: And this what, mid 70's?
MR. FOX: That was in '73, '74. And it kept growing. Then I belong to the Masonic Lodge. I've worked for 50 something years collecting money for the cripple children hospitals. In '76 they had got me in the early 70's and I work all the car dealers of Anderson County. And so in '75 I was in Oak Ridge and Red Gumson had the Oldsmobile franchise and his facilities was all like new. He kept about three Oldsmobile’s new and about five or six used cars. And I said Red if your ever wanted to sell this place, I'd be interested in buying it and he said I'll keep that in mind. Well the next year I went back again, working the dealers for which I still do today. I work at the Anderson County Dealers and usually raise around $3,000 for the cripple children off of the dealers. And he said you know what you told me last year, that it will be sooner than you think. Well just in a few days he called me and said I've been to the doctor and he said if I didn't sell this dealership he was going to have to take a day off to go to my funeral. And I said well I'll come out there and he said oh no I don't want you to have to come out here, the help would know you was looking at the place. He said I'll meet you down on the picnic tables on the river bank up there. So we met down there at the picnic table and I made a deal and bought his Oldsmobile franchise.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now where was that? Was that there on I-75?
MR. FOX: That was in Oak Ridge, Tri-Co Motors right across from the Federal Building and across from--
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, right there on the corner.
MR. FOX: And I took over, it took General Motors, where I got approved in one day with a Toyota, it took from April to October to get approved for Oldsmobile.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FOX: They drug their feet. But I got it and Oldsmobile was one of the hottest items going in, it was very good. And then in '79 took on the Chrysler Franchise, the Dodge dealership and then in '82 I found out Nissan was available and I took on Nissan for Oak Ridge. Then in '85 when the banks failed and my friend Joe Holbrook was involved with the Butcher heavily and he was in bad financial shape and I bought his GMC and Subaru franchise over in South Clinton. Then in '91 Valley Pontiac which was owned by Paul Sauler, I bought the Buick and Pontiac franchise and then in '97 I bought the Chevrolet place in Oak Ridge. And never dreamed that as a kid when I visited Oak Ridge and started a paper route down in Oliver Springs that I would have all the GM franchises in Oak Ridge. And I've stayed on and was still lucky again when, I could see the business, the future wasn't looking as bright as it had been in '05 and a gentleman had a man call me and see if I'd price my dealership. I did and he bought it. Thank goodness, the good lord was looking after me. And I had a lot of dealers that called me, said how did you know the time was right that things was going to turn down. One of them was a good friend, I said well Larry, I went out that morning and smelled the air and I didn't smell any cheese in it so I figured I better sell.
MR. MCDANIEL: How funny.
MR. FOX: Yup but I've had good long life.
MR. MCDANIEL: So are you retired now?
MR. FOX: I'm retired but I've been helping my son at Ace hardware.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that your son who has the Ace hardware there?
MR. FOX: And I hang around there, they've got a rocking chair for me to sit in. And I've been working on a few old trucks. Once in your blood I guess you can't ever get it out.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well you know you've been working ever since you were born so it's hard to stop isn't it?
MR. FOX: I sure have. And you know my heart doctor, I've had bypass surgery in '01, had another slight heart attack and my heart doctor came by to get his weed eater repaired. He said I'm so glad to see you’re here working. He said don't you stop working. He said that's what's keeping you a going, you’re staying active. Right and of course I've always had a knack for, since I built that coal truck and car haulers and I've bought and fixed up and resold and just more recently I found a roll back bed that was an aluminum bed but the old truck was rusty but the bed, aluminum don't rust. And I bought it and found another truck and switched it over and I've got it just about got it ready to go on the market. But it's been a great life and the Good Lord’s been good to me. I go to church, First Baptist Church in Clinton and last week I was honored with the Boys Girls Club of Anderson County and they elected me for the Business Leader of the Year for the Hall of Fame. It was a great honor.
MR. MCDANIEL: That is a great honor. Well good. Well thank you so much for taking time to talk with us and telling us your very interesting story.
MR. FOX: It was just my pleasure to tell the story so that people will see that hard work and persistence, staying at it will pay off.
[END OF INTERVIEW]

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ORAL HISTORY OF LESTER FOX
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
October 8, 2012
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel and today is October 8th, 2012 and I am at the home of Mr. Lester Fox in, I guess this is Clinton, isn't it?
MR. FOX: This is Clinton.
MR. MCDANIEL: It's between, it's actually between Oak Ridge and Clinton. Mr. Fox, thanks for taking the time to talk with us, I appreciate it. Now, I know you grew up, you were born and raised here and you grew up here and you've had quite an illustrious life in this area. So, why don't we just start at the very beginning. Why don't you tell me where you were born and something about your family and going to school and all of that.
MR. FOX: I was born in the Dutch Valley community, the Dutch Valley, the Donovan community, which was three mile east of Oliver Springs. I was the youngest of nine children, I had five brothers and three sisters and we lived on a two hundred acre farm. And for the first five years of school, I went to Donovan School, but my family ran a dairy farm and we delivered milk in Oliver Springs. And starting in the sixth grade, I had to transfer to the Oliver Springs School so I could deliver milk. I did it on a bicycle around town before school in the morning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year where you born?
MR. FOX: I was born in 1929, at the start of the Great Depression. My dad worked for the railroad company, he got laid off along about the time I was born. He never got called back to the railroad job until 1940.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FOX: And a short time after going back to work, of course without the medical treatment and all now, he had high blood pressure and he had a stroke and became disabled and he lived on until 1954, but he remained cripple from that stroke for the many years. And we delivered milk in Oliver Springs--
MR. MCDANIEL: So all of you, the whole family did that? Is that right?
MR. FOX: The whole family, but most of the older brother and sisters had left to different places to get jobs. Some of them had worked in Texas and some in North Carolina. And when I was a freshman in high school, we did not have a cafeteria at school. And I went downtown Oliver Springs from my school to a little cafe. And I could get a hamburger for fifteen cents and a Pepsi Cola for a nickel.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, you went to Oliver Springs High School?
MR. FOX: Oliver Springs Grammar School then onto Oliver Springs High School. And this particular day, I had a nickel left out of my twenty five cents, and I put it in a pinball machine, I won a hundred free plays. Me and my good buddy, Charles Jones, there was no way we were going back to school with a hundred free plays, so we continued on playing. We were suppose to be back in school by 1:00, but about 1:30, the plays were all gone and we were strolling back leisurely to school.
MR. MCDANIEL: And I know what you’re about to tell, but let’s go back a little bit though before we get to that part. So, how did you get to school, you know because you said you lived what, three miles outside of Oliver Springs.
MR. FOX: I rode a bicycle to Oliver Springs, an older brother that lived across the valley from us, he worked at the H. Sienknecht Company grocery store and combination dry good store in Oliver Springs. He would haul the milk down on his car, which was an older model car with a luggage rack on the back, and he would haul the milk and park right beside of the store. Me and my brother that was two years older than me would ride our bicycles. It didn't get too wet, too cold, or too snowy to make it to Oliver Springs. We got up each morning at 4:30 to milk the cows and to go deliver the milk fresh to people, set on people's front porch and brought a good high price. It was ten cents a quart that we got for milk back then.
MR. MCDANIEL: So that's how you all supported the family, was through the--
MR. FOX: That's how Mother supported our family with the milk that was sold but unfortunately, a rabid dog came through our neighborhood, and in 1942, two of our cows got bitten by the dog and they went mad. And we didn't know what was wrong with them until a veterinarian came. And so me and my brother and my mother all had to go take rabies shots because we had been around those mad cows and the Health Department shut us down as a dairy, and we couldn't sell any more milk and for thirty days we were quarantined. And we took the shots for 14 days and by that time, Mother had decided to close the dairy and we sold the cattle off at a very cheap price because they were milk cows.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was in 1942?
MR. FOX: That was in '42.
MR. MCDANIEL: So that turned out to be a pretty good time for that to happen as we'll find out here in a minute, won't we?
MR. FOX: That is true and then we go back to my time strolling back to school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah let me, I have a couple other questions about that.
MR. FOX: Okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: And this was in the 30's, you know, probably by this time you were talking about the late 30's and maybe 1940-ish or so, you were twelve, eleven, twelve, thirteen years old. And what was, you know you were old enough to remember, what was it like? What was Oliver Springs like and the whole area like?
MR. FOX: Oliver Springs was a very small little town. We had a football field, but no lights. All games had to be played in the day time and we played teams that were very close. We played Robertsville High School, we played Wheat High School, Coalfield, Oakdale, and Clinton and Harriman were two of the big teams that we played, while I was in high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, now did you play football?
MR. FOX: Yes I did, but I looked forward, I had been out a couple years for football at making the first team on my senior year, but we had about ten boys that had went into service without finishing high school and they came back to school at much older than the rest and we filled a real season football team at Oliver Springs.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh I bet, I bet you did. They were older than everybody else. And older and stronger. But let’s get back to your story. So here you are it was, what year was this? 1942?
MR. FOX: This was in the fall of '42.
MR. MCDANIEL: Fall of '42 and you had taken your nickel and you had played that pinball machine and had gotten extra plays. And you all were late getting back to school.
MR. FOX: So we were just strolling along, we were going to catch our 2 o'clock class, we changed classes every hour. And the telephone operator, Miss Myrtle, we all called her. She ran out on the porch of the house, of a dwelling house, where the phone was and said, “Boys, boys! Go get Mr. Britton. I have an important call from Washington, D.C.” We go running and we go right into the principal’s office to tell him the important phone call and we were all excited.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, was this Mr. Britton who eventually went to Clinton?
MR. FOX: That was his son.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, that was his son.
MR. FOX: Yeah, the principal in Clinton and his dad was the principal in Oliver Springs. His dad was a very small build weighed around 100 pounds and was completely bald headed. Didn't have a hair on his head, but he was one of the smartest people that I ever encountered in my life. He was very well educated and a very good teacher.
MR. MCDANIEL: So Miss Myrtle told you boys to get Mr. Britton.
MR. FOX: And we got Mr. Britton and he was good at running. He left on the run and of course we had a few minutes before we went to class. And we kindly waited around, and when he got back to school and it was before the class change at 2 o'clock. He rang the bell and told us to go by and tell all the classes to come to the gym for a meeting. And he told us that the federal government had condemned fifty something thousand acres of land and he give us the outline of it, starting at Elza Community, which we were familiar with and coming by the railroad track that had the tunnel through it and coming down the top of the ridge all the way down past Wheat School until it got down to the Clinch River.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now who called who, who was it that called?
MR. FOX: Senator McKeller.
MR. MCDANIEL: Senator McKeller.
MR. FOX: He was a very important senator and he was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in Washington. And I learned at a later date, the President called him in and said, “We've got these scientists that can split an atom and make a bomb so strong that it could end this war, but I don't know whether their theory will work or not.” Said, “We need to be able to build a plant for them to do it, could you hide it in the budget?” He said, “Yes sir, Mr. President. I sure can.” Where about in Tennessee are we going to build it? So I think it was a political trade-off and --
MR. MCDANIEL: So, Mr. Britton had you boys go and get all, tell all the teachers to get together, all the students in the classroom and you went to the gym and he started telling you all this.
MR. FOX: About his phone call and of course, turned out school early so people could go home and tell their parents. Of course then we had no television, very few homes had telephones. And so there wasn't much, a lot of the people were lucky if they got a Sunday paper. And a later date, I became the paper carrier in Oliver Springs and the surrounding area. And as Oak Ridge got started and the crowds moved in and people were living in people's barns and they were living in smokehouses, they were living in any place that they could put a roof over their head. And it would take me all day on Sunday to deliver the Sunday paper because I had to collect at each house because they may not be there the next week. They may get a room in Oak Ridge or a house, they were building houses in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you had, so I bet that was an exciting day. I bet that was an exciting time in Oliver Springs. Like lots of people talking about what was going on.
MR. FOX: Oh it was very exciting. And I still remember the remarks of my older brother-in-law that married my sister. He said, “What's old man Britton know about that, he don't know nothing, there ain't nothing going to happen over there.” How wrong he was.
MR. MCDANIEL: So this was probably late September, early October wasn't it?
MR. FOX: I'd say it was along September, October. It wasn't still one cool of a day I remember.
MR. MCDANIEL: So anyway which would have been about 70 years ago, wasn't it?
MR. FOX: You’re right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right now, it would have been 70 years ago right now.
MR. FOX: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay so tell me about the rest of the year and what happened.
MR. FOX: Well--
MR. MCDANIEL: With your family and school and everything.
MR. FOX: Well school and they started hiring people in Oak Ridge and my older brother was working at the Aluminum Company of America in Alcoa. He rode a bus from Oliver Springs that came up through Clinton. And to get to Alcoa then, there was no bridges across the river, you had to cross Henley Street Bridge and then take Maryville Highway out off of Chapman Highway. So he rode a bus and he bought a used bus and started running from Briceville. A lot of people were out of work in the Briceville community and they were hiring a lot of laborers and I remember going with him and riding the bus. I was a ticket puncher up front. We would sell tickets and then would punch the day out with a ticket puncher.
MR. MCDANIEL: So he went and bought a bus and was running it from Briceville to Oak Ridge.
MR. FOX: From Briceville to Oak Ridge. Paid $600 for this bus and it wasn't a very good bus. It was a '36 Dodge and one feature I remember greatly about it was, it had the benches long ways instead of the seats back in the older times. You had to have a good neighbor to sit behind you to have something to lean back on. There was no back rest on the center. But that's what he started out with--
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, so your family realized that this was an important, this was good opportunity to take advantage of. A lot of people came into town and you all kind of figured out what can we do to first help and you know make a living because you had just lost your dairy farm.
MR. FOX: Well people came along and knocked on our door and wanted to know if we had a room that we could rent and Mother rented two rooms in our big farm house. And these people were from down at Crossville and six of them stayed in those two rooms. And they were all carpenters. And after a month or so that they had been there, maybe three weeks to a month they were looking around when they come in from work and we had a three car garage down in front of the house. And it was built on a hillside so it was on different levels and my dad, him being disabled, he had had some lumber sawed out, a poplar tree and it was stacked up out there. And these gentlemen said if you'll let us, we'll go in and floor this garage, we've got a lot of buddies that are hunting a place to stay, can't find a place. So they went to work and just in a few evening they floored the garage. I can remember one section of it had a step down to get to the next level and no insulation, they cut windows out and nailed a board on the boards that they had took out and put hinges on it and used a stick to prop them open. Had a tin roof on it and put a big wood burning stove right in the middle of the room and twelve men rented and slept in six beds in this old converted garage. And they were also from Crossville. The 18 people that my mother kept, 16 of them were carpenters and the other two were truck drivers that hauled a bunch of material out to the carpenters. The two truck drivers were from down in Dalton, Georgia, and they were there six and seven days a week, but usually they got off on Sunday. And the people that would go home on Saturday night, then they'd drive back early on Monday morning. And we wouldn't have very many that would be there on Sunday night. And some of them that wouldn't go home would stay with us and we'd get out and play ball. There wasn't no T.V. or nothing for entertainment. But we all worked together, we washed dishes. And we were real fortunate that our farm house, we had a big bathroom with a big shower on the back porch. And I know we heated the water but I don't know, the good Lord may have been looking out from above. We had a hundred and twenty gallon water tank and it wasn't insulated. You learned real quick you didn't get close to it when you was changing clothes because it would burn you when you touched it. And when Mother cooked on a wood burning stove and it had a water back and it kept that water, there would be enough hot water for all 18 of those men to take a shower and still have hot water to wash the dishes with and all of us kids fell in and washed dishes or whatever needed to be done. And Mother would cook them a big breakfast and fix them a, they didn't have canteens to start with in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: She'd fix them lunch wouldn't she?
MR. FOX: She did fix them a lunch. Two sandwiches and a cake and an apple to put in their lunch. And she'd make five gallons of coffee. They all had a thermos bottle and they'd take them a thermos bottle of coffee with them to work and they would tell about the houses they were building on the, at the same time I would ride the buses. And we didn't have a telephone at home but we had one at school. Any of the bus drivers, my brother bought a second bus and then he heard there was a bus for sale down at Red Bank near Chattanooga. I rode with him down there and this farmer had this bus sitting out of the edge of the road for any passenger for sale. And it had very few miles on it. It had a ‘41 model chassis in under it but he had put the body on off a ‘36 model over on it as he had wrecked his previous bus. And we said, “Well, how did you change that body?” He said, “I took it into the barn and used my ropes and pulleys and pulled the body up off of it and put the chassis under it. And my brother bought it, I remember I think for seventeen hundred dollars.
MR. MCDANIEL: Which was a lot of money back then.
MR. FOX: Which was a lot of money then and he asked me, “Can you drive the car back?”, I said, “Yeah, I'll follow you and you drive the bus.”
MR. MCDANIEL: How old were you?
MR. FOX: I was thirteen. And I drove the car back and soon I was driving the buses around when they needed a repair. The principal, Mr. Britton at school would get a phone call and they'd call me to pick up bus number and they'd tell which plant it was at and would take it and get it repaired and tell me what was wrong with it and he would let me out of school. He said it was more important that you go help the war effort than you stay here in school. And I would get the buses and take them to Clinton to the Ford garage, we had an agreement with them that they'd do repairs for us. And then we'd take the bus back for the driver and pick my car up. But my brother that was running the buses and working at Alcoa had three buses going. They hadn't started the bus company in Oak Ridge, it hadn't gotten off the ground and he got his call to report for the Army for the draft call. And me and him was discussing it, he is still alive, he lives down in Oliver Springs. Building contractor, built many houses in the Oliver Springs area and then in Oak Ridge and he said I brought him to Clinton and he volunteered for the Air Force and he went through officer training and became a pilot in World War Two. But he had showed me where the buses all run and me and my brother that was two years older than me, I was thirteen, he was fifteen, we was going to run the bus line but I had an older brother, my brother Gene that was in the Army and had been in the past year or so and he was in the Tank Corps. He was a gunner in a tank. They were training up in the mountains of California and they went over a bluff and it turned over many times, probably several hundred feet down to the bottom of the ravine and broke his back. And he would write us letters. He was able to write and he was in a hospital in California and had been for probably six or seven months. Well after my brother left on Friday, on Sunday a taxi cab pulled into our place. He said I've got a telegram for you. Said it will be 75 cents for the taxi fare. I ran and got my mother and she paid him 75 cents and the telegram was from my brother that was in California we thought. And he said, “I'm on my way home, meet me at the Peggy Ann’s bus stop in Rockwood, 6:30 tonight.” So we went down to Rockwood and met him and came on back. And we told him, he didn't even know about the bus line that my brother Clyde had started. And so Monday morning he said, you come go with me and show me where these buses are and who the drivers are. Well he let me stay out of school all week long to show him about the bus line. He said, “Now you’re going back to school Monday.”
MR. MCDANIEL: And how old was he at this point?
MR. FOX: He was about twenty-six. He was thirteen years older than me. And all during the war that I worked around the garage, people would come in and ask me said where's your dad. I didn't bother to tell them that he was my brother, I just tell them where he was at. And we worked very good together and he had a, I had learned to drive. In '39 he bought a new '39 Chevrolet truck and was hauling coal up from the Briceville area to Knoxville for Braden Coal Company. And he would, then on his last trip of the day, the Federal Government had a deal that farmers could have lime to put on their pastures and their fields, under a grant and get it for free. And he would go up to Mascot and get a load of lime and we didn't have a time lime spredder, so he would scatter it with a shovel out of the back of the truck. He'd have to pull the truck up and I said well I can drive that truck, I've been watching him, I was ten. And so he let me start driving the truck and so I learned on a two ton truck. And so that helped me a lot when we got the buses so that I could drive the buses.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. So he came back and you all had the three buses.
MR. FOX: We had three, and within a couple weeks, American Industrial Transit started in Oak Ridge and they said they would lease buses to the operators. And so they started leasing our buses and as they kept growing we had to lease more buses and it's hard to believe what my brother would send me. He knew the people real well, most of them had worked for Greyhound and the government had gotten Greyhound to send some of their top officials to start the bus company in Oak Ridge. And they'd call and say we've got two buses we can let you have. He would tell them it’s okay for me to sign his name. I'd go down to AIT, American Industrial Transit and take drivers, sign his name, and pick up new buses.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now where was that, Knoxville?
MR. FOX: No, that was in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh was it? Okay, I see.
MR. FOX: American Industrial Transit and it was where the Therapy Center in Oak Ridge across from Methodist Medical center and the strip behind it all was a bus terminal.
MR. MCDANIEL: That was Central Bus Terminal, wasn't it called?
MR. FOX: Central Bus Terminal, right across behind was it the maintenance garage. And they recently tore it down and right, Methodist Medical Center is building an assisted living.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, I saw that the other day.
MR. FOX: On the facilities. But they would have a pit and people would be working down under buses that was as long as that building. There would probably be twenty buses lined up going through getting their oil changed and greased to maintain them. And they had janitors that cleaned the buses up and washed them because there was a lot of mud inside the buses. The buses that we used, they would really be a lot of mud. I used to take a water hose and go in on the weekend and clean the buses out, to get the mud out of them because there was a lot of mud in Oak Ridge. The roads was real--
MR. MCDANIEL: Now so you, you all were running the buses, I guess leasing buses weren't you?
MR. FOX: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Leasing busses from AIT?
MR. FOX: From American Industrial Transit, we were leasing the buses. We junked the old '36 Dodge that we started with, no one liked those. So we retired it early but the other buses run the full length of the war.
MR. MCDANIEL: How many did you end up with, how many buses?
MR. FOX: At the end of the war, we were running a hundred and three buses.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was just you and your brother’s, right?
MR. FOX: My brother and he could tell you where every run went. One day when we first got started, the Tennessee Railroad and Public Utility Commission came up and all bus drivers had to have a physical to drive a bus. So we had a little fifteen passenger bus and he loaded all of them up, the only doctor in this area who could give a physical was Dr. Stone down at Oliver Springs. At his clinic he also was delivering a lot of babies. And so they went down it to come time for the evening shift at 12 o'clock for the evening shift to go to work and they hadn't gotten back. So my brother was getting the mechanics and telling them, you go to Beach Grove, you go to Briceville. We had one driver that was about the same size that I was at that time. He weighed about 130 pounds. He had raised the seat up in the bus, put two 2 by 4's in under it, lowered it back down and scooted it and I still remember the bus number, 327. I told my brother, I can drive 327. He said, “Well, you take it go to Long Grove.” I went to Long Grove and backed around a store there and everyone was lined up about 50 people. Two big husky construction workers asked me where the driver was and I said well he had to go to Oliver Springs to get a physical, he'll meet us in Lake City. One of them said, the other one said are you going to ride with him? He come out with a little oath and he said yeah, I've seen him drive everything. When those two got on, the other forty-eight people followed them. I loaded up fifty people on a bus.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FOX: But I drove very, very careful. This road had a lot of road with no guardrail and even today there's part of that road that’s not got a guardrail on it. And I drove it into Lake City and the driver was waiting and I got off and he got on. But I'd worked there at the station, the buses had to gas up every trip, going. And we had some that run out of Jellico and Oneida. They had to gas up going both directions. The tank wasn't big enough for them to make a big round trip. And so as they would come in off the run, they'd have to turn around to get to the gas pump that was right in the middle of Lake City and gas them up at both directions. And how we wound with as many buses they, was an operator in Lafollette, Tennessee, that had several buses and the federal government got him for not reporting his reports right and they were defrauding the government and sent him to the penitentiary. They took all of his government busesand gave them to my brother to run. And the operator that ran out of Jellico down through Elk Valley, he got nervous and he come to my brother and said if you take my buses, I'll quit. So he took them too. So that give us, when the war was over we was running 103 buses and had a mechanic crew that worked on the buses. And one mechanic I learned a lot from that a little small guy from North Carolina often wondered why he didn't go to Oak Ridge to get a job. But he was a real good mechanic, he could fix, he worked on race cars in North Carolina after several years of him working, he finally told me the reason he was wanted it in North Carolina for hauling moonshine liquor and he knew if he went to get it, they investigated in Oak Ridge, they'd know where he was at for him to get a clearance. And I wondered why he would always wait and go home about dark to drive to North Carolina and he had come back and get back early in the morning. He’d drive in darkness back and forth home but he was a very good mechanic and became a good friend and taught me a lot about mechanical work and maintaining vehicles.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now where the government, were they good to you all? Did they pay you well?
MR. FOX: The government was real straight. They were real good to operate with but they wanted you to run a straight set of books and you were paid in more or less cost plus of what you spent. And the government would sell tickets to ride the bus and you could ride seven days for a dollar and a half. And they changed colors and have a different color, well then occasionally you'd have a rider that wouldn't have ticket. And each driver had a fill out a trip report, he had to do that every trip. He had to put all the ticket stubs, how many people that he hauled on each run and how many cash fares he had. And the federal government prosecuted some drivers for stealing the cash fares and not reporting them correct. The government had people a riding buses and different things that were FBI agents and one particular instance I remember, a gentleman moved into Lake City and rented an apartment in the same apartment complex that my brother had an apartment I stayed in. Well, he would come and loaf around at our garage shop. Well me and him got to going out to eat together after I'd get all the buses headed into Oak Ridge. We'd go one of the restaurants to eat. And finally one day he said, he was about the same size that I was, a little small guy. Probably he was I’d say in his mid-20's, or between 25 and 30. Said I'd like to borrow a pair of your greasy coveralls. And I said what you want with them. And he told me that if you ever tell anybody, this could get me killed. He showed me his papers, he was an FBI agent. And he said I've got to go into a shop and work and there is some loose talk going around. And they want nobody to talk about what they were doing. And so he went back in the shop and got a hold of some greasy transmissions and what not. Grease his hands up, got grease in under his finger nails, borrowed my greasy coveralls. He didn't want a clean pair; he wanted a pair of greasy ones. He wore those into work and went to work in this shop and stayed as a new worker and wasn't really doing the work. He was piddling around seeing what he could hear people talking about. And of course, it's even wrote in the history that people was talking on the bus, one guy working a crossword puzzle and wanted to know what the symbol was for uranium, well they right quick grabbed him and he got off the bus.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet they did.
MR. FOX: But it was something to see all the construction equipment that I'd never seen in my life with them building Y-12. And I was at Y-12 more and K-25 than I was at X-10. We hauled workers to X-10 but just occasionally I'd have to go there to pick a bus up. But I was 13 year old and I drove the wrecker and I drove it over the weekend. There was a lot of accidents on the two lane roads around and people got out a drinking on Saturday night and I'd drive the wrecker over the weekend and pulling in wrecks. And state trooper would be there. He'd never say anything to me about my license and I would drive to Knoxville every day. Government sold us a '42 Chevrolet pickup that was practically new to use for a parts truck. And I'd go to Knoxville and pick up parts everyday practically we'd need a bunch of parts because we had several different brands of buses. Yeah, we had Internationals and Dodges and Chevrolets.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now did you have to have the parts shipped into Knoxville or were they readily available in Knoxville?
MR. FOX: The dealers in Knoxville and I would even go into Maryville and round up parts for the buses from a couple of dealers in Maryville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well that was, and you've got to think of that to; that was in the heyday of buses. I mean you know, a lot of buses ran back then you know, a lot more than now I imagine.
MR. FOX: Reeder Chevrolet in Knoxville carried a lot of truck parts and I was in Reeders' just about every day. B&B Chevrolet, which later became Beaty Chevrolet. I'd go to both of them, maybe one wouldn't have it, another would. I'd go to International, I'd go to Kerr Motor Company, I'd go to Spires Motor Company, the Ford dealer, and then I'd go over to Maryville. I remember going in at Maryville and I became friends with them there and they said well we don't know what we’re going to do. They said the government sent us a telegram this morning for us to not sell any new vehicles that we've got that the government is going to take and they'll pay for them and take all the vehicles.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FOX: Yep, they had an order out and they went around to dealerships picking up the new vehicles. They had a quonset hut set up, kind of a production line.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FOX: And the headlights and the taillights and glass is all taped up and the painted them G.I. color.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FOX: Olive Drab.
MR. MCDANIEL: And where did those go?
MR. FOX: They went for the people working in Oak Ridge. They donated for security cars, of course the army was taking care of the security and they had their Jeeps but they needed trucks, they needed pickups and any description of truck they found a place to put it. Then they took all of the new vehicles and--
MR. MCDANIEL: Just bought them all and got them ready--
MR. FOX: The government bought them to use them at government installations. And they brought a bunch of tractor trailer buses in that, the Central Terminal in Oak Ridge that maybe part of the workers on that bus would go to X-10 part of them to K-25 and party to Y-12. Well they could get off and free transfer and get on one of these tractor trailer type buses. And they also run some of the tractor trailer type buses to Knoxville, hauling workers. Well they had a little coal burning stove that sat back in the bus, in the back of them. And one day down at K-25, that as they turned a sharp turn, that stove turned over. And the caught the bus body on fire and I was really surprised, it burnt all the wood off of it and it was a car hauler. It still had the ratchet tie down chain still in the bottom of it and parts of skids were still into it. And they had taken all of the car haulers, because they weren't making any cars for civilian use and made buses out of them and the government had bought all of them up and put a wooden plywood body on them. And they called them cattle cars back then, but they tore that burned--
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, was anyone in the bus when it fell over.
MR. FOX: No it burned out, nobody got injured in it. But I think the bus was empty and the stove turned over where they kept a fire.
MR. MCDANIEL: And it was wood so it burned up.
MR. FOX: Yeah you'd see them going down the road, a small little pipe sticking up. When it turned back, a smoke rolling out of the trailer.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure, my goodness. So you all did this throughout the war. So, why don't you tell me what happened at the end of the war.
MR. FOX: Well let me tell you another thing, a funny thing that happened. I was over in Knoxville and Reeder Chevrolet was down on State Street. A large wide sidewalk about ten feet wide and I would pull up on that sidewalk and run in and get my parts. And the Greyhound bus station was across the street and they had no parking there for a little ways but I wouldn't [park] in the street, I was up on the sidewalk. Well this big policeman came down when I was loading my parts up. He had his foot propped up on my rear bumper and writing a ticket. And he said, where's your driver’s license boy? I said I ain't got any, I'm working for the war effort. And I'd been okay if I would have hushed then but being a kind of smart ale I guess. I looked up to him and said what are you doing. He said you know I can take you to jail. And I said I'll tell you what. I got my little black book out. I said I've got to call the government in Oak Ridge and let them to tell you to turn me loose. These buses got to run, I've got some important parts here. You know he studied for a minute then he said you go on. Well the next day I was back in town, I run up on that sidewalk, I seen him up the street there about 50, 75 yards writing parking tickets, I give him a high five and he waved back at me and we had no more problems. But the state trooper came in at Lake City and he was there every day. We'd stop and get him a nickel Coke-Cola and some of them told him I had a birthday coming up on Friday. He comes to me, he said I want to see you down at Clinton and get you some driver’s license Friday. He said I'm getting too much static of you driving these buses and this wrecker and all. And I said Doug, I won't be but 14. He said you look to me like you 16, you be down there. Well so happened, Friday morning I had a call. A bus broke down in Oak Ridge and I had the wrecker and I stopped at the courthouse in Clinton and went in and my buddy there, Doug and two other troopers. He said give this boy some driver's license. Said he turned 16 today. And they said well what’s your full name, I told them, address and he said, you don't need to give him any test, I've seen him drive everything. They typed me up a set of driver's licenses. They said two dollars please and handed them to me and I walk out the door but I told it as a joke that old courthouse just had 10 foot doors. I grew up so much when I got those driver license in my pocket, I was bumping my head on the top of that door.
MR. MCDANIEL: How funny. So you ended up with a driver’s license even though you shouldn't have had one for a couple of years.
MR. FOX: That is true, but you know the war was on and America was united and everybody was working for the war effort. On one occasions before that, I'd went to pick a bus up in Oak Ridge and got back just below Clinton, where the high school is down in Clinton. That was the main road and there was another bus broke down, one of ours. And I told the driver to take a red flag and go up and let me get in front of him. So I had a wrecker, a bus, a 40 foot of chain and another bus. When I turned the corner to get on 25 W going toward Lake City, I look and seen the trooper running across the courthouse lawn. I knew he was coming after me. So he pulls me over where the ice house was up there at Clinton and I pulled up in there. He got out and said don't you know to pull trains in the state of Tennessee you've got to put them on a track? And I said I was aiming to take them to the top of the hill and leave it, and then come back and get it. He said no you drop this bus behind, you go up here and drop the bus that you’re pulling, comeback and hook this other one up and take it on to Lake City. And he started walking, he turned around and pointed his finger at me and he said if you stop and hook that second bus I'm going to put you into the jail. I believed him, I didn't hook it up. But it was a great time and--
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet you learned a lot didn't you? At such a young age?
MR. FOX: I learned a lot at a very young age. I learned a lot of mechanical work, I learned how to weld.
MR. MCDANIEL: Learned how to deal with people.
MR. FOX: How to deal with people and it was just a great experience growing up in the greatest time, I guess, on earth.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure exactly. So at the end of the war, what happened?
MR. FOX: At the end of the war, everybody was going back home. And in fact I have been a very, very lucky person all my life. When the fourth of July when I was sixteen year old, I bought a chance on a new Jeep from American Legion. The war was over. For one dollar, I won that Jeep at the Clinton Fair Ground. And a brand new Jeep for one dollar and it kind of got me in trouble over at Lake City where we had the shop running and where I met my wife and married her, I was lucky again. But her mother, when I had that Jeep she said, that boy driving that Jeep around I believe he is a smart-alec. She said don't you have anything to do with him. That was like pouring gas on a fire. But she became my best friend. She's deceased now and we were very fortunate. We would have been married 62 years come November the 11th. And we've had a great life, raised three sons and just had a wonderful life. And after the war was over--
MR. MCDANIEL: You won that Jeep.
MR. FOX: I won the Jeep. And in, it had no heater, no radio and it got kind of cold at Christmas time. And someone put an ad in the paper, had a '41 Chevrolet, will trade for a Jeep. I answered the ad, called the number and the man was in Clinton and he had a camping trailer. He was from Nashville and he had worked in Oak Ridge, he didn't have a trailer hitch on his car and a Jeep had a hitch on the back of them. And we traded, I traded even and he used it to pull his camping trailer back to Nashville. He got laid off and was wanting to go back to Nashville. And we traded and that got me started but when I was running my paper route down to Oliver Springs, there was an older car siting in one of my customer's yard and her name was Grace. And I said Grace what are you going to do with that car? She said we want to sell it for $15 but said the transmission is bad in it. I counted my money and said I can't buy it today but I can next week. I didn't have but twelve dollars and something right then. But I said you hold it for me. Well I bought it for $15 and my brother bought me a transmission for $5 for me cleaning up the buses. I went with him to get a part for the buses in Knoxville from a junk yard. I put it in and my mother let me drive it on down to Oliver Springs. They had opened a movie theater in a garage down there, which is still there today, they're restoring it and--
MR. MCDANIEL: What year was this, how old were you when this happened?
MR. FOX: That was in '43.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh okay.
MR. FOX: I was 13 and drove the car down and I remember the brakes screeched real loud, I was embarrassed because the brakes screeched so loud. It got everyone’s attention and this boy came over and said whose car are you driving? I said that's mine buddy it's paid for. And he said well I got me a job over at the project and he said what would you take for that car? I said I'd take $75 for it. He said I ain't got but $60 but I'll give you $60. I said give me your money. I got his $60 and walked home, three miles back home. That may have been when I decided the car business was pretty good. And my senior year in school, I'd won the Jeep and I'd save my money during the war and we had seven or eight boys that back and finishing up high school. Well they were selling the surplus vehicles in Oak Ridge in '46, the fall of '46. And but you had to be a veteran to buy then. Well these buys was going to school to get $50 a month off the government to finish school. I said, “Boys, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll take you to Knoxville and get you a permit from the Veteran’s Administration and each vehicle that you buy, I'll give you $50 from buying it for me and I'll pay for the vehicle.” Well they was about six of them lined up and I went and told the professor what we were doing. He said that was a good smart idea. Said I'll excuse ya'll from school. He'd excuse all of us to go to the auction from school. And so I bought surplus vehicles and resold them and made good money while I was in high school. And then I was with my brother, he bought some buses from Greyhound in Louisville, Kentucky. And I went with him to go up and drive one of them back, well they had a bus sitting there that had the grill knocked out of its front end. I said what are you going to do with that wrecked bus, I said I'll make me a coal truck out of that. And the gentlemen said, “Son if you want that bus, I'll take $400 for it.” I had $400 in my pocket and paid him, brought it back, couldn't bring it that day because the headlights were knocked out of it and I had to wait and get up there early in the morning where I could make it home without any lights. And I sold the body off of it for $225 and a gentleman lived in it for over twenty year out on the Clinch River, right near the Massengill Bridge. He took that body off it, I let him drive the bus out, take it off of them and then brought the bus back, the chassis back. And I built a coal truck myself, did all the work myself. And put it on a coal haul down at Oliver Springs. And it worked out very good for me, I run it for couple of years down there because that was a big thing. K-25 was burning a lot of coal at the steam plant and I got married in 1950 and went into the Army and when we came back out I was in the Army Reserve down at Elza Gate, it's where we met. And it was an engineering outfit, I was a bulldozer operator to operate the bulldozer. And stayed in it for 6 years, but when I came home from the Army, looked around for a job and K-25 was hiring. Said they were starting a training for maintenance mechanics. And I filled out the application and they said well it will probably be six months before we call you because we have to get you Q-clearance. Well they called me in one week and I thought somebody was playing a joke on me. And the man said nope, when I went down there they said why didn't you tell me you had a Q-clearance. Said all we had to check was the week you was home from the Army to clear you. And so for six months they wouldn't let you start the program. And so they put me at the welding shop, a man named Charlie Johnson run it, K-25, where all the welders hiring in had to come take their test and all the welders that worked out there would have to take tests every six months to a year to get certified again. And so they give me a pickup truck to drive and I worked there with him and learned to weld and I could pass a first class welders test but I had no working experience as a welder. And it was great issue, a lot of people was waiting to get their Q-clearance, that they'd let come and stay at the fire hall and I could take two of them with me on my badge to go get lunch over in the cafeteria. And they just lined up every day and I'd kind of kept record of it and passed it around, they wanted to see inside that plant, where they was going to work, to ride over with me. But one particular day they called at the Personnel Office, said we've got a welder up here to take a welder’s test and I'd have to go over and they had a guard on the door of the dormitory type building that the offices was in. And I'd have to go into the Personnel officer and he'd give me the candidate for welding and I'd take them back over. Well, this little guy I asked where you from. He said Louisiana, he was a little dark complexed Cajun guy. I said where you been welding at, he said I've been welding on the pipeline down there. So I brought him over to the welding shop and took him in the room and I'd set up the test for them to take. And Johnson the man who run it could listen without even looking at the weld. He could listen to the welder and tell you if they were a good welder or not. And this guy got this all welded up and Johnson said this man’s got experience and he's not stuck the rod one time and said man he's got it burning just right, he could tell by the hum of the machine. About that time, well the telephone rang and it was Personnel said bring that person back immediately over here. He told me they said they want him back at the Personnel Office. So I loaded him up and I looked at his weld and me and Johnson both did. We said boy he made a pretty weld, where he welded it up. Well when I get back over to the Personnel Office, I was kind of surprised, usually there was just one guard on the gate, but there was three. Two was a milling around outside. And I walked up and showed my badge to go through, I heard a little commotion, the other guy was behind me. When I turned around they done had handcuffs on him. He was a wanted fugitive, we could never figure out what for, what job, lots of them tried to find out but it really doesn't matter. But they arrested him right there. He was a wanted fugitive but he was a good welder.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess he'll be welding in prison.
MR. FOX: Right but I worked out the apprenticeship and became a first class mechanic and so they started laying off at K-25. And the Cold War efforts was some settled with Russia in '54. We were sitting around talking and this one boy, a buddy of mine, and I was one of the first they hired, in fact I was the first one they hired. And he was about three hundred and forty down the list and he had got his layoff slip and we were eating lunch. And I said, I'll tell you what do, if they'll let me take your layoff slip, I got a job I can go to and let you stay. And all these experienced mechanics around looked at me and said, have you lost your mind? Have you gone crazy? I said no, I can go help my brother go sell cars. And they, so we went and got the foreman and asked him and he said well the only person that can approve is V. B. Goddard, he was over all of the maintenance. And he said I'll go ask him. The next day they said yep, we'll let you take his layoff slip and he can stay on, V. B. approved it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FOX: But he said we can't pay you any interest on your savings plan. I was putting a dollar a week in a savings plan, I lost a dollar and forty-two cents interest on my savings plan.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my goodness.
MR. FOX: But I went into the car business and was always at the right place at the right time and one day my brother was out of town for a week and guy rolled in and said I'd like to sign you up with a Toyota franchise. I looked the car all over, I got my mechanic--
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what year was this?
MR. FOX: That was in 1966.
MR. MCDANIEL: '66. Toyotas' were new weren't they? I mean well new to the United States.
MR. FOX: New to America and of course we didn't have cell phones or anything, my brother was gone. I signed up, filled out all the paper work on Friday, he called me on Saturday said I've got you approved, can I come out and pick up a check for $2800 for your parts shipment and your signs and get an order for 18 cars, that’s what they require you to do. And so my brother got back on Sunday and said well how’s business been? I said well it's been real good, we've sold about 50 used cars this week but I said, we're a new car dealer now. He said what's that? I said Toyota. He said what is a Toyota, I ain't ever heard of one. It's a good little car, I called out buddies down at Chattanooga, they've had it for a hundred days and they've sold a hundred cars. And so it lagged on and unfortunately my brother got killed two years late in a car accident, '68. And Toyota never did really catch on until the energy crunch of '73. And I was very fortunate at the time, I had been arguing with my district manager to give me more cars and more cars. And it was in the fall of the year he call me up and said, we'll I've got a bunch of cars that dealers didn't take. I said I've got a hundred and one cars. And I said well what have you got? He read the list over what they all are and he said how many do you want? I said I'll take all of them. And he said well you know I just give you 30 cars in the allocation yesterday. I said I know that and so they called back the next day and wanted to know if we was able to pay for that many cars. I said yeah if you bring the paperwork down here with the proper signature on it, we'll just pay you in one dollar bills. So they went ahead and shipped the cars and it was a real lucky move. And gas got scarce and they went on a turn in earn. I had all those cars in stock so that got me, I could get a hundred cars a month from Toyota right when they were really scarce.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FOX: To end, it initiated exactly the right time for me because I had the big inventory.
MR. MCDANIEL: And this what, mid 70's?
MR. FOX: That was in '73, '74. And it kept growing. Then I belong to the Masonic Lodge. I've worked for 50 something years collecting money for the cripple children hospitals. In '76 they had got me in the early 70's and I work all the car dealers of Anderson County. And so in '75 I was in Oak Ridge and Red Gumson had the Oldsmobile franchise and his facilities was all like new. He kept about three Oldsmobile’s new and about five or six used cars. And I said Red if your ever wanted to sell this place, I'd be interested in buying it and he said I'll keep that in mind. Well the next year I went back again, working the dealers for which I still do today. I work at the Anderson County Dealers and usually raise around $3,000 for the cripple children off of the dealers. And he said you know what you told me last year, that it will be sooner than you think. Well just in a few days he called me and said I've been to the doctor and he said if I didn't sell this dealership he was going to have to take a day off to go to my funeral. And I said well I'll come out there and he said oh no I don't want you to have to come out here, the help would know you was looking at the place. He said I'll meet you down on the picnic tables on the river bank up there. So we met down there at the picnic table and I made a deal and bought his Oldsmobile franchise.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now where was that? Was that there on I-75?
MR. FOX: That was in Oak Ridge, Tri-Co Motors right across from the Federal Building and across from--
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, right there on the corner.
MR. FOX: And I took over, it took General Motors, where I got approved in one day with a Toyota, it took from April to October to get approved for Oldsmobile.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FOX: They drug their feet. But I got it and Oldsmobile was one of the hottest items going in, it was very good. And then in '79 took on the Chrysler Franchise, the Dodge dealership and then in '82 I found out Nissan was available and I took on Nissan for Oak Ridge. Then in '85 when the banks failed and my friend Joe Holbrook was involved with the Butcher heavily and he was in bad financial shape and I bought his GMC and Subaru franchise over in South Clinton. Then in '91 Valley Pontiac which was owned by Paul Sauler, I bought the Buick and Pontiac franchise and then in '97 I bought the Chevrolet place in Oak Ridge. And never dreamed that as a kid when I visited Oak Ridge and started a paper route down in Oliver Springs that I would have all the GM franchises in Oak Ridge. And I've stayed on and was still lucky again when, I could see the business, the future wasn't looking as bright as it had been in '05 and a gentleman had a man call me and see if I'd price my dealership. I did and he bought it. Thank goodness, the good lord was looking after me. And I had a lot of dealers that called me, said how did you know the time was right that things was going to turn down. One of them was a good friend, I said well Larry, I went out that morning and smelled the air and I didn't smell any cheese in it so I figured I better sell.
MR. MCDANIEL: How funny.
MR. FOX: Yup but I've had good long life.
MR. MCDANIEL: So are you retired now?
MR. FOX: I'm retired but I've been helping my son at Ace hardware.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that your son who has the Ace hardware there?
MR. FOX: And I hang around there, they've got a rocking chair for me to sit in. And I've been working on a few old trucks. Once in your blood I guess you can't ever get it out.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well you know you've been working ever since you were born so it's hard to stop isn't it?
MR. FOX: I sure have. And you know my heart doctor, I've had bypass surgery in '01, had another slight heart attack and my heart doctor came by to get his weed eater repaired. He said I'm so glad to see you’re here working. He said don't you stop working. He said that's what's keeping you a going, you’re staying active. Right and of course I've always had a knack for, since I built that coal truck and car haulers and I've bought and fixed up and resold and just more recently I found a roll back bed that was an aluminum bed but the old truck was rusty but the bed, aluminum don't rust. And I bought it and found another truck and switched it over and I've got it just about got it ready to go on the market. But it's been a great life and the Good Lord’s been good to me. I go to church, First Baptist Church in Clinton and last week I was honored with the Boys Girls Club of Anderson County and they elected me for the Business Leader of the Year for the Hall of Fame. It was a great honor.
MR. MCDANIEL: That is a great honor. Well good. Well thank you so much for taking time to talk with us and telling us your very interesting story.
MR. FOX: It was just my pleasure to tell the story so that people will see that hard work and persistence, staying at it will pay off.
[END OF INTERVIEW]